In 2009, banks in the United Kingdom reported 51,000 phishing incidents targeting customers, a 16 percent increase from the previous year.

Source:  Jeremy Kirk, “Counterfeit Card Fraud Drops by Half in the UK,” PC World, March 10, 2010.

In 2009, financial institutions in the United Kingdom lost $121.3 Million (80.9 Million British Pounds) to counterfeit credit cards. The losses were down from the $280 Million (169 Million British Pounds) that were lost in 2008.

Source: Jeremy Kirk, “Counterfeit Card Fraud Drops by Half in the UK,” PC World, March 10, 2010.

A study released in 2010 found that despite peer-to-peer networking downloading falling by 15 percent, the illegal downloading of content increased by 3 percent over the same period.

The study found that the cause of the increase was due to less people using P2P networks but instead downloading songs directly from websites and utilizing streaming content services.

Source:  Sebastian Seibt, “Study shows how downloaders skirt anti-piracy laws,” France 24, March 10, 2010.

During February 2010, Italian officials in Rome seized 30,000 wildlife products while searching through the luggage of more than 3,000 passengers.

Source:  AFP, “World cops target traditional healers over smuggled wildlife,” Google News, March 5, 2010.

Between 2007 and 2008, a human smuggling gang was smuggling people from Iraq into the United Kingdom and charging $10,500 (7,500 British Pounds) a person. The gang, who authorities believe smuggled 1,000 people into the country, would often charge up to $21,000 (14,000 British Pounds) to people who were desperate to leave Iraq.

Source:  Peter Allen, “‘Baghdad ring’ of people-smugglers ‘helped hundreds of migrants sneak into Britain’ ,” Telegraph, March 4, 2010.

A report by the House of Commons found that between 25 to 30 tons of cocaine enters the United Kingdom each year.  Around 3.5 tons of cocaine was seized by law enforcement in 2009.

Source:  Thomas Penny, “Cocaine Seizures Are ‘Woefully Inadequate,’ U.K. Lawmakers Say,” BusinessWeek, March 3, 2010.

The British Crime Survey reported that 437,000 people between the ages of 16 to 24 used cocaine within the past year in England and Whales. This translated to 6.6 percent of between within the age bracket using cocaine, an increase from 5.1 percent the year before.

Source: Amardeep Bassey, “Teen cocaine use on the rise as more seek treatment,” BBC News, March 1, 2010.

Creative industries in the United Kingdom claim that up to 50 percent of all Internet traffic in the country is file-sharing activities.

Source:  Robert Verkaik, “Internet piracy crackdown by US studios,” Independent, March 1, 2010.

There were an estimated 5 million drug addicts in Russia in 2010, with half of all addicts addicted to heroin.

Heroin causes at least 30,000 deaths per year in Russia.

Source: Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, “Russia blames Nato for heroin surge from Afghanistan,” BBC News, February 27, 2010.

Russia President Dmitry Medvedev stated that police corruption and incompetence lead to 760,000 theft cases, 124,000 burglaries and over 2,000 murders or attempted murders to all go unsolved each year.

Source:  AFP, “Medvedev orders crackdown on Russian police corruption,” Google News, February 18, 2010.